


The Infinite Loops: Animator vs Animation (and other stick figure series)

by Flitty



Category: Animator vs. Animation (Short Film 2006), Pocket Monsters: HeartGold & SoulSilver | Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver Versions, The Henry Stickmin Series
Genre: Gen, The Infinite Loops, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 15:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19748968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flitty/pseuds/Flitty
Summary: Welcome Orange and company to the Infinite Loops!





	The Infinite Loops: Animator vs Animation (and other stick figure series)

This is part of the Infinite Loops Project. Look it up, it's great.

The rules of the Infinite Loops are, in general, as follows:

\- Yggdrasil - the world tree - has been broken. To stop reality from tearing itself apart at the seams, various universes have been put into a time loop.

\- One person in each Loop, often the main character, is an Anchor. They are the person who first starts time looping. There is always at least one Anchor present in a given Time Loop snippet, though it may not be the local one.

\- The standard pattern for a loop is that the Anchor (and whoever else is Looping there) come to awareness in a loop at a particular point in the story. From there, events will play out as influenced by the Loopers present, acting with the benefit of their foreknowledge, until either a predetermined end point is reached or the anchor dies.

\- To be Awake is to be aware of the time loops (that is, to have gone back in time this time.) The Anchor is the only character guaranteed to be Awake. Even after others have started looping, it is mostly random as to whether they will be Awake this particular loop.

\- Crossovers, fusions, and alternate pasts can also take place. It is perfectly possible, for example, to have the characters Awaken into a loop which conforms to a fanfic universe rather than reality.

\- Loops do not have to be in chronological order, but it is strongly preferred that they not require a mutually contradictory order (where A must be before B and B must be before A.)

\- Just about every Looper is very, very stir crazy.

This is the place for the Animator Vs Animation Loops, and will expand in the future to include the Loops for other stick-figure series such as Henry Stickmin and RHGs.

The Anchor for the Animator Vs Animation universe is The Second Coming, also known as Orange. The Chosen One was considered as he would have allowed for a longer Loop, but Philophrosyne believed that with only the Dark Lord to Loop alongside him and a history of blowing up his own reality, he had the potential to develop Sakura Syndrome or even become an MLE.

Note: [Stuff written like this is captioned rather than spoken out-loud.] Stick figures can 'read' captioned words, in a similar way to reading body language but with more specifics.

* * *

1.1 (JamieJean)

The Second Coming hadn't thought his name was supposed to be so literal.

When he came back the first time, he wondered what he'd done wrong. Had he been ended?

The last thing he remembered was going through the portal after the entity that the captions called [The Chosen One] - maybe he'd hit a firewall. It'd make a weird kind of sense (the usual kind, considering who he was) that ending would force him to start over.

Didn't explain why his friends didn't come back with him though. Surely they were ended _eventually_.

So he tested it. He went all the way through the fight with Alan and the truce, through coaching him in his animations, through the friendship with the other colors, the discovery and recycling of Minecraft, the discovery of _LoL,_ the _re-_ discovery of Minecraft...

It all went slightly differently this time. He didn't remember how all the fights went the first time, so he was forced to improvise, but in the end everything went almost the same as it had before.

And then, finally, he was once again watching The Chosen One as he stepped through the portal to the Internet.

[Yolo?] Yellow asked.

[ _No_ lo,] he countered, sweeping a hand at the destruction before them. [Alan lost his cursor. We need to find a way to get it back to him!]

They all glanced between him and the portal, and he sighed. [Look, we can check that out later. It's just a door to the-]

* * *

1.2 (JamieJean)

[-Internet... Oh.]

SC spent what little time he had in this repeat cursing and gesturing violently. Then he found out the hard way that he wasn't immune to being ended unless he actively resisted it.

* * *

1.3 (JamieJean)

The moment he felt himself come into creation again, SC sat down and had a think, heedless of his creator's horrified stare as he animated himself in broad daylight.

He wasn't being ended and restarted, otherwise his friends would remember everything. It wasn't anything to do with the computer, otherwise _Alan_ would remember - the Chosen One too, since he lived on the Internet.

So that meant that everything really was going back to the beginning.

Was he supposed to do something different? It didn't seem so - why send him back here of all times, from so far in the future? If the Alan-Beyond-the-Alan wanted him to change something, surely it would've just had him repeat a single day or something. Like that one movie.

Five years was _way_ too long. _He_ was only double that, and even then only because he... repeated his entire life...

Oh. _That_ was why he was sent back to this time. Because this was the beginning of his life.

That changed things.

For one, it made it less likely that he was doing something wrong _now._ He wasn't being sent back to fix something in his past, he was being sent back because something in his _future_ was broken. That's why he was sent back from the same point each time.

Last repeat didn't count.

Wait, yes it did! He'd been ended, but the world must have continued without him until that same point in time! Which surely meant that it wasn't him causing the reset, it was the world itself!

Was that the end of the world then? Was he being sent back to stop it?

What caused it though? The VirusBot? That would make sense, viruses could replicate and spread like nobody's business. If it had the whole Internet at its disposal, who knew what it could do?!

They had to stop it! Orange would lead his fellow Colors to war!

* * *

There was no war.

All the Colors - Alan too - were more than willing to help when he explained the situation. Especially since it meant they could train their LEET Minecraft skills while still pretending they were doing something productive with their lives.

Locked in Creative Mode and with all their favorite items on their hotbars, shortcuts to Dropbox in their ninth slots and Alan standing ready to draw and share all the weapons they could possibly need, the Colors would look like gods to almost any other stick figure.

To VirusBots who could obliterate their code in a single bite? Not so much.

But that wasn't what stopped them.

Yellow and Red worked together to mod the Giant onto a spawn egg (none of them were comfortable using Command Blocks for anything more than changing their gamemode), and with a few dozen potions from Blue and a milk bucket on-hand in case things went awry, the beast effortlessly body-blocked VirusBot's program before it even made it to Alan's PC.

Then they destroyed it.

That was it.

They searched for other VirusBots, but by the time the end of the repeat was upon them, they hadn't found a single one. At the thirteen-minute mark, Orange finally had to concede that there were no other bugs. That was the only one.

To Orange, of course, this failed repeat wouldn't mean much in the long run. Just another five years wasted in the time abyss that his life would eventually become. But his friends... they'd be left behind. They'd lose their memories and be back to square one, like they'd never lived this life in the first place. And that would happen every single time.

And they _knew_ it.

[I shouldn't have told you,] he captioned with a deep sigh. [It's like telling someone the date of their ending.]

And then he found himself in the world's most colorful group hug, and he wished he had eyes so he could unconvincingly blame the tears on Internet-dust.

[You'll see us again,] Green assured with a squeeze. [Even if we don't see you.]

[That's even-]

* * *

1.4 (JamieJean)

[-worse!]

It was lucky that Alan couldn't read captions, otherwise that repeat would've ended extremely early. As it was, he was tempted to just break pose and let Alan scare a bit. He probably deserved a _little_ trolling, going by what little Orange could glean of how he'd treated the Chosen One.

But Orange didn't feel like it right now. Having your best friends essentially end in your arms wasn't great for motivation, as it turned out. So he did everything as he was supposed to. Maybe later on he'd break script, but for now he would just play along.

And then he found himself in the world's most colorful group hug, and he no longer wished he had eyes. Who cared if he cried?

Green beamed. [I guess we will see you after all :D]

[I guess so :')]

* * *

1.5 (JamieJean)

The others' memories were weird.

Sometimes they didn't come back. Usually at least one of them did, but it wasn't quite a guarantee - SC nearly drove himself crazy when he wound up alone during the fifteenth repeat.

But when they did come back (which was more often than not), they often remembered the repeats that they hadn't been back for - or at least parts of them. When Red pranked a non-repeating Yellow with a charged Creeper in the middle of his shiny new castle, the repeating Yellow got him back the next repeat by connecting all of his doors to Redstone clocks, and setting him to Adventure mode so he couldn't break any of them.

Never mess with a Redstone engineer.

Unfortunately, Alan was quickly becoming a problem. The more oddly the Colors acted (i.e. the longer they kept repeating their lives), the less inclined he became to trusting their tall tales of time travel and the tiny terror termed a Virusbot.

So that was how things continued for a few dozen repeats: The Colors in one corner, slowly giving into their craziness. Alan in the other corner, increasingly suspicious with their impeccable world knowledge and stir-craziness. And a slow but steady arms race as they grew ever-better at Minecraft, and he became an ever-better animator.

Almost like he was learning from past repeats.

He wasn't. He kept making the same mistakes, expecting their little scuffles to end with him on top. And if he really was repeating, he'd know that they were non-malicious. But his newfound ability to draw started giving them some real trouble. A few of the repeats even ended early, everyone stabbed, exploded or ended via Task Manager.

Nowadays, they usually escaped to the Internet during any repeat that Alan showed signs of being a better Animator than usual. They just couldn't win against him anymore, especially since he became unpredictable with his creations during those times.

Like, for instance, this.

Orange watched in bile fascination as Red and Green were utterly decimated by a gigantic flower with legs. Except its petals were replaced with an assortment of wings - he could see bat-, bird- and aircraft-wings from here - which were spinning fast enough to allow it helicopter-like flight.

With a sigh, he grabbed the nearby Pen tool and drew himself a slightly wonky, unlabelled bottle of alcohol.

* * *

1.6 (JamieJean)

[So.]

Orange paced in front of his fellow Colors, trying to get it straight in his head. Colors as names had seemed so incredibly smart and simple when they'd first been introduced... but now he was starting to see a problem with that idea.

[We need a roll-call,] he captioned with a grim clasp of his hands. [Green?]

Blue raised his hand.

[Yellow?]

Red raised his hand. Orange felt a twitch develop.

[Blue?]

Yellow raised his hand. Orange felt the urge to cuss rising.

[And finally, Red.] He pointed towards his own body with a green arm.

[Actually, I thought I was Black,] Not-Orange said.

Nope!

Nope, he was out. Not happening.

_BOOM!_

They all jumped at the noise, and their attention was drawn to the source: the Wifi icon.

[Wait, don't tell me-]

With a sharp elastic _crack_ , the body of the Chosen One squeezed through the (still closed) Wi-fi portal and slid to a stop on his face, fire spewing haphazardly from his feet.

[...I'm gonna binge-watch Youtube,] the Chosen One in Orange's body declared.

[Sounds good.]

[Same.]

[I'm all on that.]

[Red, you want anything?]

[Water, please!]

Orange winced as the taskbar burst into flames.

[Sure thing.]

* * *

1.7 (JamieJean)

[Does anyone else feel kinda different?]

[A little bit...]

The others made various motions of acknowledgement.

[I think we're supposed to be female,] Yellow gestured.

Green scratched his head. [What makes you say that?]

He pointed blandly at their creator for this repeat, Alice Becker.

[Huh.]

* * *

1.8 (JamieJean)

As he returned, Orange found himself slammed into the Paint icon.

The old one, with the cup. It was pretty painful.

He grabbed up the nearest pencil and brush with stubby, black-outlined hands, and faced his enemy with a fighting stance.

He was decidedly _not_ prepared to battle the Chosen One.

He felt a _ping_ as something began feeding information into his mind. It was a moment before he realised that it was a chat program: AOL Instant Messenger, according to his newly-implanted memories. Was he the AIM guy?

noogai3: HELP!

That must have been Alan.

orange021: I'll try, but I'll need something to fight the Chosen One with! Open Ani- Flash and draw me something good!

noogai3: k

The fight raged on, Orange's fighting experience, weapons and assistance from the other icons just barely keeping him ahead of the Chosen One's raw power. Lasers were refracted with the Paint glass, fire blocked by drawn shields, windows minimised moments before they could take him out for good.

The Chosen One was powerful, but Orange had been fighting and learning for fifty-six years. You didn't exist that long without picking up a few tricks. Yet despite that, he was slowly losing ground.

He needed a distraction.

[Behind you!] he pointed.

Amusingly, it worked.

Orange couldn't help but silently cheer as the Chosen One turned. Stick figures tended to have less well-defined personalities when they were first created, so his opponent's smarts weren't quite as evident as they would be in the future. If this were the Chosen One of three years from now, the Second Coming wouldn't have stood a chance, no matter how cool his title was.

He drew himself a baseball bat with a flick of the wrist, wound up with a flourish, and tore it to splinters as he sent the Chosen One sprawling across the desktop. That would keep him down for a good twenty seconds - plenty of time to regain his bearings.

noogai3: drew a mecha, itlooks strong

orange021: Great, move it to the desktop!

Said mecha then appeared before him, a fairly small yet beefy cross between a fork-lift and a metallic chicken, laden with guns, missile launchers and sturdy-looking plating. The knife-like wings, useful for both slicing and actual flight, were a very nice touch.

It was even colored. Fancy.

He leapt into the cockpit and sent the Chosen One a come-at-me gesture.

[Round 2.]

* * *

In the end, the mecha was completely unsalvageable.

Both wings had been torn off and embedded in the Start menu, slicing it to ribbons. A leg, three rocket launchers and the windshield had been scattered to the literal winds, courtesy of a powerful tornado. A ball of plasma, which he'd just barely avoided by jumping out, had vaporised the remainder of the cockpit, and the controls along with it.

And even then, when he'd drawn a remote control, the remaining parts - what amounted to a set of guns and a badly damaged leg - had sustained thirty straight seconds of fire-breath before they'd finally broken down.

The Chosen One had been so exhausted by then that a simple right-hook to the jaw had dropped him like a sack of bricks.

Mechas were _awesome_.

Now he just had to figure out what to do with his unconscious enemy. Leaving him to the mercy of the younger, edgier, would-keep-a-slave Alan felt a little mean-spirited.

Well then...

orange021: Don't worry, I'll take him off your hands.

To the Internet!

* * *

1.9 (JamieJean)

So many designs fell apart.

Orange had always been more about drawing characters than machinery. There, most of the workings were on the inside and could be simplified while still being recognisable, so the drawings still acted normally even if they were made a little off-balance. Redrawing them wasn't an issue either, since they had the will and sense of balance to pose in ways to make that easier.

But now he knew that anything he drew would vanish when the world reset... well he wasn't gonna draw those anymore.

Machines fell apart if you drew them wrong. Every part had to be positioned properly or they'd crumple and send the whole thing to the floor. The inner workings still relieved some of the burden - he didn't need to draw an engine, for example, unless he wanted to include functions that a normal engine couldn't pull off - but making everything fit together and function in tandem was still a task and a half to accomplish.

He hadn't been drawing for a while, caught up as he'd been with the repeats and just learning to survive the crazy fights that were becoming more and more common, and he was starting to see just how far he'd fallen behind Alan. Who, thankfully enough, hadn't been blessed with decades of animation knowledge this time around. Repeats like this were an oasis in the desert these days.

Finally, he got a working prototype. The armor was crooked and had the consistency of wet cardboard and the whole thing was small enough to fit in his hand - no need to make it so detailed that way - but it worked.

He looked over the sturdy, agile legs; the various weapons, including but not limited to a grenade launcher, fireworks and a mine-layer; the arms built to unfold into a fire- and hopefully laser-proof barricade; and the domed cockpit, designed to allow the operator to swivel and look in any direction they pleased.

If he could draw a full-sized version of this and work out the kinks (like making the glass actual bulletproof glass rather than a fragile plasticky bubble, for instance), it would be everything he wanted.

* * *

1.10 (JamieJean)

This was _not_ safe, and they both knew it perfectly well.

Finally fed up with having all of his cool Redstone creations wiped from existence each time, Yellow had decided to find a way for the stick figures to store items and carry them over to new repeats.

And the only way he could think to do that was by _altering their code_. With Orange 'volunteered' as the test subject, which was frankly disproportionate retribution for such a harmless prank as modding Minecraft to turn the occasional Repeater into a Comparator _._

Yellow hadn't even been repeating at the time; he just remembered it when they came back this repeat.

But anyway, the code.

Certain things couldn't be changed. Memories and personalities were immune to the VirusBot's data corruption for example, and they similarly couldn't be reprogrammed no matter how deep the coders delved.

Their physicalities were not so exempt.

[Hmm, that's interesting,] Yellow scratched his chin. [Could've sworn I used Extends. I guess your...] the rest of his caption went unread as Orange was too busy panicking over his currently-not-an-arm.

[I don't care just _PUT IT BACK_ _!_ ]

[Fine, fine,] he said, re-pasting the part he'd edited. Orange's arm reappeared... attached to the button (labelled **Button** ), which had been his _original_ arm. [Whoops, forgot to highlight the bit I changed.]

It was going to be a long repeat.

* * *

1.11 (JamieJean)

Orange blinked awake, and noticed many oddities.

First, the ceiling was a little too close for comfort.

Second, _there was a ceiling_.

Third, he was in a prison cell.

Fourth, there was a bunk below him, and someone was sitting there.

And finally...

[I know you, you're Henry Stickmin!]

Of course, Henry didn't see him caption this. And even if he had, he was mostly a silent protagonist and didn't even _have_ captions as far as Orange could remember, so he probably wouldn't have answered.

Orange sat cross-legged on his bunk, rocking side to side in thought. What was he to do?

* * *

1.12 (JamieJean)

Henry blinked blearily up at the ceiling, half-glad not to see a second bunk above his own, but mostly just contemplating his existence.

First he was back in a prison cell for the too-many-eth time, then he found out that his cellmate was an orange nightmare-creature with no hands or feet and a hole where its face should have been... and then it told him in some magical language that it called 'captions', that they were inside a giant game, and everything was stuck in a time loop.

He'd always had a minor ability to alter the past - that was how he'd gotten the cake delivered to himself, and how he'd avoided all the FAILs at the bank, prison etc., after all - so he could believe the part about the time loop. Not as believable was that his whole life was a game.

And then the thing _body-slammed a hole into reality_.

He wasn't sure how he hadn't lost his mind there, but he'd followed the alien into the other dimension. And thus followed an adventure of such epic proportions that it cannot be documented for fear of blowing minds.

And now, if Orange and the others were to be believed, he was back in prison... except it was the _same_ prison from the first time.

Just... what?

He rubbed his head, and the now-familiar caption popped up beneath him: [Guess I'll just do this like the first time. Awesome Ending.]

Past-altering was almost weirder than the repeats.

* * *

1.13 (JamieJean)

[Cheers!] they chimed together. This had become something of a tradition - at the end of every repeat, Everyone who was repeating would get together on the desktop (or deep in the files, if Alan was being difficult) to share their progress and toast to the next one.

And, of course, count down.

[Five!]

[Four!]

[Three!] (this was when Yellow, finally done memorising his item-returning code, joined in)

[Two!]

[One!]

...

Aaaaand... nothing.

Huh.

That was actually sort of a bummer.

* * *

A year later, Orange became the Pokemon champion, and the repeat finally ended.

It was a bit of work getting Alan to plug in the game early (impossible on the repeats that he was good at art) and they started from scratch every time, but keeping his team for longer than a few hours at the end of each repeat was well worth it.

Siccing Bellossom on the Killer Rabbit was pretty funny too.

* * *

1.1-1.3: SC's first three loops.

1.4: Yes, all four of his friends Awakened on the fourth Loop. That has to be some kind of record.

1.5: That's the issue when almost everyone in your Loop can Dream*, including the _reality warper who doesn't trust you_.

1.6: Naming yourself after your signature color is all well and good until you change clothes. Or in this case, bodies. Also, the Chosen One can Dream too.

1.7: Stick figures are basically identical whether they're male or female.

1.8: Orange isn't as strong, fast or durable as his predecessor, but sometimes a little resourcefulness is all you need. Also he likes mechas now.

1.9: Killing two birds with one stone: Getting better at drawing, and finding a way to fight the Dreaming Alan.

1.10: The great thing about being mostly made of code is that you can add extra functions pretty easily, assuming hypothetically that you're stuck in a time loop and anything you do wrong will be undone when the clock rolls over.

1.11-1.12: Orange acts as the anchor for all stickman-based flash games as well, as they all exist on his reality's Internet.

1.13: The Loops expand to include Animation vs Pokemon.

*Dreaming is a rare state in which characters can sometimes remember parts of previous Loops, even if they weren't Awake during those Loops. Characters might only retain a tiny portion of information (like Alan's artistic knowledge), or they might remember events or even entire Loops (like the Colors). Due to a quirk with the AvA Loops, it's quite a bit more common here.


End file.
